what are Principle CI classes in CMDB ?

[Raj56]

Is it mandatory to configure Principle CI classes in CMDB ? Do we need to identify Principal CI classes as best practice ?

[Vishal Savajia1]

Fine Rahul, 

ITOM is very vast and ever evolving 🙂

[Amit Sharma7]

Hi Vishal, 

Could you please guide how to apply that filter on cmdb_ci table?

Thank You

Amit

[andrewmccabe]

My reading of Principal Class is "important to my organization" ... Starting in 2014, my organization created a custom table (managed classes) and this is used in lots of filters throughout ... I am now examining whether the Principal Class Feature and Filtering can replace this old customization to get us back to more of an OOTB scenario ... Our managed server classes, for example, are AIX, ESX, HPUX, Linux, Appliances, Windows, etc. ... So, if I look at the server table and apply the managed class filter (by default) - i only see those classes that are important overall - there may be records in other classes, but they can be seen by directly examining the non-managed table or removing the default filter 

[Rob Barnett]

It would be great if ServiceNow also published the intended purpose of these flags/fields rather than just say when used it filters.......... 

In a previous organisation we also created a table of 'Managed Classes' to distinguish those in/out of scope for Configuration Management controls/ Incident/Change/Problem etc.

We had a concept of what we called Auxiliary CIs vs. Managed CIs - e.g. when you Discover a server multiple CI records are create to capture the Servers configuration (e.g. Disk, File System, NIC, IP Address) etc. these are what we considered Auxiliary Classes and the Server CI was the Managed CI - the one we would log Incidents and Changes against and the one we would relate to Technical Service Offerings 

Hey ServiceNow/Scott Lemm - Maybe this could be included in a future version of CSDM (along with the Hardware and Software Asset Management Tables - not just their Lifecycle Stages/States)

[JamesLindsay]

I'm also wondering if having a Reference Specification on the CI field of a change record for example overrides this Principal Class flag? I ask because I find CIs that are in classes that do not have the flag turned on but, do meet the Reference Specification filter. I would expect them to work together. For example, I do not want to show any CIs where Operational Status = Retired. Right now, I can't explain why this CI in a non-Principal class is selectable.